It shows London, NYC, Toronto, Mexico City, LA, and Portland all being nuked. Then a New World Order responding with nukes? to Syria, Iran, and China, and a global police lock down rounding up ‘dissidents’.

Does the Telegraph think this is good cultural content? Is it modern viral marketing in bad taste like the VW Polo car ad just making hype for a movie release? Is it a psyops by an intell agency designed to disturb, nothing more, or conditioning?

According to the Infowars crew the Telegraph hasn’t clarified who made them or why they are continuing to appear after many complaints.

Well, in the card game Blackjack highest possible hand is a “blackjack” meaning an initial two-card total of 21 (an ace and a ten-value card, as ace are 1 or 11). At 22 the game is ‘busted’.

The source ‘presentations’ have no sound, but here are the quick views with tunes.

In Blackjack Part 3 it becomes more graphic novel style and less power point presentation.

The FM3 Buddha Machine is a creation of FM3, a China-based music duo of Christiaan Virant and Zhang Jian. They are best known as the creators of the Buddha Machine （貝佛） loop-player. Inspired by buddhist chants and ambient loops a la Brian Eno, the duo made the first Buddha Machine in 2006. Since then over 50,000 have sold worldwide, and in November 2008, the new version is ready to go.

Basically just a small box with 9 ambient loops (300 seconds) that can be selected with a volume knob and now a pitch bend. Check out Zendesk which has put together a FM3 Buddha Machine Wall with 21 of them to help you reach satori.

The eight-tonne mosaic is held together by snap-out plastic parts similar to those used in modelling kits.

The Netherlands is shown as series of minarets submerged by a flood – a possible reference to the nation’s simmering religious tensions.

Germany is shown as a network of motorways vaguely resembling a swastika, while the UK – criticised by some for being one of EU’s most eurosceptic members – is absent from Europe altogether.

Raised eyebrows

The 16-square-metre (172-square-foot) work was installed at the weekend to mark the start of the six-month Czech presidency of the EU.

There has already been an angry reaction to the piece from Bulgaria, which has summoned the Czech ambassador to Sofia to explain.

The three artists responsible for Entropa were led by David Cerny who, says the BBC’s Rob Cameron in Prague, is the enfant terrible of the Czech art world.

When his government commissioned him to create the installation, several eyebrows were raised, and they were not raised in vain, our correspondent adds.

Czech Deputy Prime Minister Alexandr Vondra said he was only informed on Monday that the installation was not the work of 27 European artists, but David Cerny and two colleagues.

Mr Vondra condemned Mr Cerny and said the Czech EU presidency was considering what steps to take before Thursday’s official launch.

“An agreement of the office of the government with the artist clearly stated that this will be a common work of artists from 27 EU states,” he said.

“The full responsibility for violating this assignment and this promise lies with David Cerny.”

Mr Cerny, who presented Entropa to his government with a brochure describing each of the artwork’s 27 supposed contributors from each member state, has apologised for misleading ministers, but not for the installation itself.

“We knew the truth would come out,” said Mr Cerny. “But before that we wanted to find out if Europe is able to laugh at itself.”

He added that Entropa “lampoons the socially activist art that balances on the verge between would-be controversial attacks on national character and undisturbing decoration of an official space”.

Mr Cerny first created a splash in the early 1991 when he painted a Soviet tank, a Second World War memorial in a Prague square, bright pink. His act of civil disobedience was considered “hooliganism” and he was briefly arrested.

Last August, the U.S. Army held a three-day conference in Portsmouth, Virginia, to look at new developments in military science and hardware. The confab was called the “2008 Mad Scientist Future Technology Seminar.” Really. It was.

Presentations covered the following areas:

•Seminar Overview (Bushnell, NASA-Langley)

•Robotics (Jones, iRobot Corporation)

•Human Life Extension (Coles, Gerontology Research Group)

•Quantum Technology (Dowling, Louisiana State University)

•Molecular Manufacturing (Jacobstein, Teknowledge)

•Machine Intelligence (Yudkowsky, Singularity Institute)

•Global Sensor Grid (Orcutt, University of California – San Diego)

•Synthetic Biology (Weiss, Princeton University,

•Virtual Reality (Peterson, The Strategy Augmentation Group)

•Beyond Silicon Computing (Mazumder, National Science Foundation)

•Nano Materials (Sulcoski, National Ground Intelligence Center)

•Alternative Energy (Bushnell, NASA Langley Research Center)

•Brain/Neurologics (Braunreiter, SAIC)

•Emerging Individual Empowerment (Petersen, The Arlington Group)

•Superempowered Individuals (Smart, Acceleration Studies Foundation)

…

The Mad Scientist group sees more than just a world of danger in the 2030s. “Most likely results include an increased life span, a solution to the energy crisis, ready availability of food and fresh water to all, a global distribution of technology, education, economics, and — therefore — wealth. This will reduce the tension between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ while the capabilities of robotics and access to virtual reality to both care for and entertain will create the perception of well-being almost universally around the globe. Advancements are limited only by imagination and resources.”

From the crazed band the Flaming Lips finally comes the release of Chistmas on Mars, a movie eight years in the making. Christmas On Mars arrives complete with a lot of imagery and themes that long-term fans of the Oklahoma psychedelicists will recognise from their albums: foetuses, outer space, the march of science, death, and the way, as a track from 2006’s At War With the Mystics put it, “the will always negates defeat”.

It was a saga for the band to make the low-budget even while band member Steven Drozd was the lead and addicted to herion. At times they were suggestive of a project that was never going to get finished, an idea too far even for a band who have based their career on making the improbable happen. Here was frontman Wayne Coyne gamely building sets from junk in the driveway of his home in a “ghetto-esque” district of Oklahoma City, while his terrifying neighbours looked menacingly on. A film with a look similar to American Astronaut it shows a future that feels like a working class diner with a bunch of bitter drunks. (American Astronaut makers also have a new film coming out Stingray Sam.)

It would be a shame to think that all that exertion just went into making a shonky film that no one but Flaming Lips diehards would be interested in seeing. As it turns out, their efforts weren’t entirely in vain. If they hadn’t made Christmas On Mars, they wouldn’t have recorded the soundtrack, and the soundtrack is fantastic.

Although not a film with a strong narrative to follow it has some tripped out shots and interesting music that create a strange world.

one of the new projects is the “Multi-Robot Pursuit System”. which basically is to make a pack of robodogs to hunt down ‘a non-cooperative human subject’. Given that iRobot last year struck a deal with Taser International to mount stun weapons on its military robots, how long before we see packs of droids hunting down pesky demonstrators with paralysing weapons?